Category: Articles

WHILE some Labour parliamentarians sadly seem to be continuing to focus their energies on attacking Jeremy Corbyn, it was good to see shadow chancellor John McDonnell explain on the Radio 4 Today programme this week that the productivity problems Britain faces are a product of a lack of long-term investment, and that is now what is needed to deliver both sustainable growth and social justice following the EU referendum result. Read the full article

The right want Jeremy out because he stands a real chance of changing this country, says Ken Livingstone.

SINCE his landslide win in the contest to be Labour leader last September, the Jeremy Corbyn-led Labour Party has continually and consistently opposed the Tories’ austerity agenda and is starting to shift the framework of political debate in Britain.

Jeremy has only been the leader of the Labour Party since September but he has already delivered significant change, not only in the direction of the Labour Party but in how politics is conducted. Read the full article

The most extraordinary thing about recent political developments in Brazil is that just 55 senators overturned the will of 54 million Brazilians at the ballot box who re-elected President Dilma Rousseff. They did this by suspending her as the President for 180 days and installing Michael Temer as interim President. For those of us who expressed solidarity with activists against the US-backed dictatorship in Brazil from 1964-1985,and stood with the Chilean people against General Pinochet following the 1973 coup there, alarm bells are ringing at this right-wing attempt at regime change in one of the world’s largest democracies. Read the full article

Myself, Tony Benn and Jeremy Corbyn were among those MPs who rebelled against Tony Blair’s decision to introduce tuition fees in 1998.

I remember speaking alongside student campaigners for free education who rightly warned that the Labour government’s decision was the thin end of the wedge when it came to passing the costs of education on to students themselves.

There was something particularly angering about seeing MPs who had themselves benefited from a free university education voting to take away the ladder of opportunity for future generations. Read the full article

First, I would like to thank the Morning Star for giving me the opportunity to write a regular column for the paper on austerity Britain and the paper’s support against those who wish to exclude me permanently from the Labour Party, which is much appreciated.

Over 85 years this paper has been an essential voice for social justice and peace and is needed now more than ever.

Last week saw the Queen’s Speech and, as we are growing to expect, the detailed key points that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour MPs gave in response to proposals for more austerity in the speech — most notably on the issue of further rises in tuition fees — received less media coverage than the ongoing warfare in the Tory Party over the EU referendum. Read the full article

THE Tories expected to write a script for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour as a weak, irrelevant opposition. Yet, as they review the wreckage of their budget, they must surely know this is not going to plan.

Indeed, polling suggests some of their key policy proposals are now more out of touch with the British people than ever before — from benefit cuts for disabled people to the need for action to save our steel, to the forced academisation of schools. Read the full article

Jeremy Corbyn was right to say this week that the Budget the Chancellor delivered was “actually a culmination of six years of failure” and that “this is a recovery built on sand.”

Almost all the growth in our wealth in recent years has gone to the richest 1 per cent, while working-class and middle-class families have seen real incomes cut by 9per cent since the banking crisis.

Yet in much of the media, we are still subjected to the big lie — repeated again by George Osborne this week — that we are in this mess because the last Labour government spent and borrowed too much. Read the full article

George Osborne’s budget this week represented a continuation of the same economic strategy that has seen the richest 1% watch their wealth double while ordinary families struggle to make ends meet.

Whilst there were some sweeteners for voters, it lacked a vision for a better future and showed the Chancellor is not listening to the growing coalition of voices – from the experts at the IMF and OECD to our trade unions – that our saying government investment is needed to navigate the choppy waters ahead. Read the full article